Gateway Cinephiles

Uffish, But Not Frumious

Alice in Wonderland
2010 (USA)
Director: Tim Burton
Viewed: March 5, 2010
Format: Digital 3D Theatrical Projection (AMC West Olive Theater)

Any film treatment of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books must overcome a conspicuous stumbling block: How does one adapt a pair of Victorian nursery stories, consisting mainly of a succession of absurdist dialogues, into engaging cinema?  A literalist, scene-by-scene recreation of the Alice tales would make for an unconventional film, but also a wearisome and distinctly un-cinematic experience.  Given his gothic fairy-tale sensibilities and enduring fascination with outcasts defined by their hyperbolic physical and emotional qualities, Tim Burton would seem a comfortable fit for Carroll’s brand of amusing dementia. However, the director’s track record with big-budget adaptations has been woefully mixed, with Exhibit A in the negative column being his misguided, excruciating Planet of the Apes remake.  Happily, Alice in Wonderland, while hardly the rich, cerebral adaptation that Carroll’s works deserve, proves to be a solid little adventure tale that traipses through a deliciously gratifying Burton-esque landscape. In Wonderland, the director discovers an expansive sandbox for the funhouse impulses he favors in his most inventive works. Unfortunately, Alice never remotely achieves the madcap vigor of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetle Juice, or Batman Returns (all exemplars of Burton’s vision at its most fiendish and uninhibited).  The story is little more than a boilerplate Hero’s Journey, but coiled within are both the sensory splendors we expect from Burton the Fabulist, as well as some welcome jottings of subversion.

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Innocence and Other Noble Lies

The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band)
2009 (Austria / Germany / France / Italy)
Director: Michael Haneke
Viewed: March 3, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

There is a mystery at the core of Michael Haneke’s Palm d’Or-clinching new film, The White Ribbon, but it is not a mystery that requires a solution.  Unlike the director’s brilliant splatter of post-modern mindfuckery, Caché, his latest feature does not wander outside the frame in the pursuit of answers.  The culprit who has committed The White Ribbon’s bizarre misdeeds is hiding in plain sight.  Set in the rigidly Protestant German hamlet of Eichwald just before World War I, the film presents the events of a single year, a year in which a series of peculiar and disturbing misfortunes befall the community.  Someone in the village is clearly responsible for these misfortunes, but sorting out whodunit is, at best, tangential to the film’s striking emotional and intellectual vigor.  Maintaining a mannered, somber tone that swathes the viewer in Old Testament dread, Haneke uses his setting and plot as portals through which he accesses a breathtaking array of themes.  Impeccably constructed and exquisitely shot in black-and-white, The White Ribbon will frustrate viewers seeking dramatic jolts.  This film is all trembling and lip-licking, a work brimming with the sour-gut sensation that something is wrong, just out of sight.

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Experimental Treatment

Shutter Island
2010 (USA)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Viewed: February 21, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

Eternally the Catholic kid from the Garment District, Martin Scorsese has long used his narrative features to explore the relationship between violence and guilt.  Granted, the stultifying, deforming influence of societies on the individual frequently figures prominently into his films, with the societies in question ranging from blinkered, hierarchical subcultures to the vast, alienating melting pot of over-stimulated contemporary America.  Even Scorsese’s most unambitious feature in the past two decades, his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, took pains to develop the original film’s anemic foundations into a more substantive commentary on the absurdities of the criminal justice system and the allure of masculine mythology. However, cultural settings only seem to hold the director’s attention inasmuch as they relate to searingly personal concerns; at the center of most Scorsese films is a battered man squeezed between others’ rules and his own sins.  Given these tendencies, I suppose I should have expected that Shutter Island would prove to be something more elaborate and bruised than the “mere” creepshow thriller that is being presented in the film’s promotion.  Not that there’s anything wrong with a creepshow thriller done exceptionally well (q.v., Drag Me to Hell), but Scorsese, despite his profile, isn’t the film-maker that leaps to mind when one hears the phrase “Master of Horror.”  Shutter Island feels for all the world like a florid imitation of a Wes Craven delve, and it’s only in the final twenty minutes that the curtain is pulled back to reveal that Scorsese tell, the strand of private Christian torment that stretches all the way back to Mean Streets.

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Hurry Up and Wait

Police, Adjective (Politist, adj.)
2009 (Romania)
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu
Viewed: February 9, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

Corneliu Porumboiu’s willfully staid and yet wholly absorbing new feature, Police, Adjective, operates on two interlocking planes.  On the one hand, it is a police procedural of the driest sort imaginable, an agonizingly attentive study of how peoples, objects, and information travel through a drug investigation in a small Romanian city.   In this city, the Eastern Bloc bureaucracy (and furniture) is still firmly in place, as are draconian narcotics laws that the rest of the European Union has discarded.  Strictly as a lesson in how dull police work can be, and specifically how dully absurd it can be in a former Communist dictatorship, Police, Adjective is an intriguing work, whose stifling realism serves as a direct refutation to the bombast of the Cop Picture (regardless of nationality).  Porumboiu, however, is far too talented and unruly a director to simply engage in a bit of genre revisionism and call it a day.  Accordingly, there is another, more impressive level to the film, one absorbed with language and the way it shapes, steers, and constrains us.  What truly fascinates about Police, Adjective is how easily Porumboiu grafts what is for all practical purposes an academic treatise on linguistics onto his police procedural, and how the two complement and fortify one another.

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Bad Bad, Not Good Bad

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
2009 (USA)
Director: Werner Herzog
Viewed: February 7, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Full disclosure: I have never seen Abel Ferrara’s pitch-black 1992 character study, Bad Lieutenant.  Neither has German film-maker and madman Werner Herzog.  Unlike me, however, Herzog has directed a film titled The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans, so he perhaps needs a better excuse than my all-purpose cover for any patch of cinematic illiteracy, “It’s in my Netflix queue.”  If the reports are to be believed, Herzog does not regard his new feature as a remake, reboot, re-imagining, or anything of the sort.  He claims that he doesn’t even know who Ferrara is, and that the film’s producers dictated its title.  All this makes me much more comfortable approaching tBL:PoC - NO (yeesh, it hurts to type that) as a standalone work, rather than a tribute to or riff on Ferrara’s film.  Unfortunately, even if one regards Herzog’s film as a wholly original work, there’s no way around the fact that it is his sloppiest film in years, especially when compared to his last narrative feature, the lean, propulsive Rescue Dawn.  Did I mention that the corrupt, degenerate, possibly psychotic police lieutenant of the title is played by American actor and madman Nicholas Cage?  Letting Cage run loose in such a role might have been a nutty stroke of genius, but alas, Bad Lieutenant proves to be just another Bad Nick Cage performance, surrounded by a tonal and thematic muddle.

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Play It Loud Enough to Keep the Demons at Bay

Crazy Heart
2009 (USA)
Director: Scott Cooper
Viewed: February 3, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

When you strip Scott Cooper’s directorial debut, Crazy Heart, down to its skeleton, there’s not much that’s original about it from a story standpoint.  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a broken-down musician must come to terms with his personal demons before he can rise from the ashes and regain some of his former fame and fortune. Alas, Cooper doesn’t bring anything especially cinematic to these deeply rutted roads.  Sure, Crazy Heart was filmed on location in the American Southwest, and that lends it an agreeable sun-beaten texture, but Cooper’s direction is undistinguished.  Based purely on the look of the thing, Crazy Heart could pass for a television movie-of-the-week rather than a limited theatrical release boasting high-profile actors.  Fortunately, those actors are all in fine form, especially Jeff Bridges, who portrays the aforementioned broken-down musician, a grizzled country veteran named Bad Blake.  The glib cynic in me would like to believe that someone observed, “You know, put the Dude from The Big Lebowski in a cowboy hat and he could pass for the lost brother of Kris Kristofferson,” and then—bam!—there’s your movie.  Blessedly, Bridges’ performance amounts to much more than canny casting.  He and Cooper turn a familiar story, executed with rote efficiency, into something haunted and ultimately worth watching.

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Smoke and Mirrors

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
2009 (UK / Canada / France)
Director: Terry Gilliam
Viewed: January 17, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

When it comes to Terry Gilliam films, I wouldn’t say that the only attraction is their design, but I’d be kidding myself if I denied that the essential allure of a new Gilliam feature is the look of the thing.  Those occasions when Gilliam has mated his distinctive mode of fantasy—part Victorian / Edwardian stagecraft, part comic strip zaniness—to a compelling set of characters, the result is tongue-in-cheek gold, as in Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.  (His two dystopian science-fiction films, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, are equally great, but vibrate to an entirely different frequency.)  Gilliam’s new feature, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is a weird bauble that fits snugly into oeuvre, yet like all of the director’s weaker efforts, it’s also a mess from a storytelling perspective.  It’s debatable how much of that can be blamed on the regrettable death of his leading man, Heath Ledger, and how much on Gilliam’s own hand, but it’s also telling that Imaginarium is disjointed tonally and narratively.  At its worst, Imaginarium plays out less like a film and more like a book of concept art that has been inelegantly cobbled together into a film.  There’s something more than a little perverse about a film-maker with such palpable thematic interest in myth-making but who nonetheless has a hard time finding a foothold in his own tale.

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Plenty of Memberships, Few Privileges

Up in the Air
2009 (USA)
Director: Jason Reitman
Viewed: January 16, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

Back in May 2008, I observed after a second viewing of the backlash-savaged Juno that Jason Reitman’s crisp, understated direction plays a crucial role the film’s success, and that it in fact called to mind the comedic work of Sydney Pollack.  I still stand by that statement, and by the film’s place as one of the most perfectly realized ensemble comedies of the decade, which I will readily defend with knife clutched firmly in teeth.  However, Reitman’s latest film, Up in the Air, serves primarily to highlight the bottled lightning quality of Juno, solidifying its status as a fortuitous confluence of direction, writing, and performance that may never again be approached by the parties involved.  Up in the Air boasts none of the focused, superbly paced comedic storytelling that characterized Reitman’s previous effort.  In fact, the characteristics that most define his direction here are a distressing lack of understanding regarding his audience’s sympathies, and a clumsy attempt to fuse two or three stories that do not function together as well as he imagines.  To be sure, George Clooney’s unfailingly magnetic presence renders the proceedings more tolerable than they would otherwise be, and the central romantic drama of the film is compelling stuff.  Yet these caveats only highlight the ill-advised and even insulting aspects of Up in the Air.

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Late to the Game: 9

2009 (USA)
Director: Shane Acker
Viewed: January 10, 2010
Format: DVD – Universal (2009)

Shane Acker’s talent for nimble, evocative world-building is on full display in 9.  It’s telling that even at a lean 79 minutes, the film still feels a bit padded and sluggish on the story front, given that all the satisfying setting crunchiness is delivered swiftly and efficiently.  Acker deftly establishes the essential traits of his post-apocalyptic world and the clan of burlap-skinned homunculi that inhabit it, while leaving plenty to implication and imagination, including the precise mechanics of the setting’s steampunk-tinged alchemical magic.  Perhaps unexpectedly, the nine little doll-folk are quite distinctive, both visually and as characters, but the real draw here is not the simplistic story—a hero awakens evil and then defeats evil, etc., etc.—but the richness of the blasted landscape, the uncanny menace of the monsters that stalk it, and the thrills of numerous small-scale battles and escapes.  Even the vague, unnecessarily drawn-out ending doesn’t markedly detract from 9’s guiltless visceral appeal, which is that of a novel, densely detailed world sketched with precision and enthusiasm.  Acker gratifyingly demonstrates that not only aren’t the fantasy, science-fiction, and dystopian genres dead, they’re often found in the same film, and a gorgeously animated one at that.

Late to the Game: Funny People

2009 (USA)
Director: Judd Apatow
Viewed: January 7, 2009
Format: DVD – Universal (2009)

Funny People represents a distillation of the best qualities from Judd Apatow’s previous film, Knocked Up.  In this dark, meandering tale of second chances and human fallibility, the director employs both his ruthless pursuit of affecting emotional detail and the self-effacing vibe of star Seth Rogan (in his plush animal mode).  Meanwhile, the film jettisons the last Apatow outing’s retrograde sexual politics and ridiculously pat conclusion, resulting in a melancholy film that reveals the director not as an intrinsically comedic film-maker, but as someone interested in the absurdity of psychological landscapes.  Thus, Funny People, while hardly a barrel of laughs, is nonetheless perceptive, audacious, and weirdly charming.  Adam Sandler indicts his own career via a thinly-veiled alter ego character, and Leslie Mann’s performance devastatingly demonstrates how bright, bighearted people can make unbelievably stupid decisions.  Apatow’s focus on his characters’ feelings rather than the narrative is both a strength and a weakness.  Absent a conventional structure or a clear antagonist, Funny People spins off the rails a bit in the final half-hour, as the director searches for a way to conclude a story that has no end.  Still, the film proves to be an invigorating slap to viewers expecting yet another storybook conclusion.